I've started experimenting with the Panda3D engine. I spent all of yesterday working on it and here's what I've got so far!

First I worked on getting a basic scene created. I extended the tutorial that they have as an introduction. The camera follows the character and you can rotate the camera around the character. You can move the character with wasd controls. Oh, and you can push the button in the upper left hand corner and it prints something to the console, serious stuff there!

Once I got a basic understanding of the underlying engine I decided to have a look at some of the physics options that they have working with it. I choose the Bullet physics engine. No idea if that was the right choice but it looked to have the most documentation with it.

The ball falls and then rolls around the terrain, nothing too exciting and all I did was take an example and rewrite it to make it more OOP.

All in all I'm pretty happy with that for one days work trying to get an understanding of the basics of the engine. The documentation with Panda3D is occasionally spotty but it does seem to be a fairly simple engine to use.